The Young Lady's Mentor eBook

their principles, and are carried out by them into
the duties and avocations of future life. It
would be startling to many to know with what intelligence
and accuracy motives are penetrated, inconsistencies
remarked, and treasured up with retributive or imitative
projects, as may best suit the purpose of the moment.
Nothing but a more extensive knowledge of children
than is usually possessed on entering life, can awaken
parents to the perception of this truth; and awakened
perception may, perhaps, be only awakened misery.
How important is it, then, that every thing in the
education of women should tend to enlighten conscience,
that she may enter on her arduous task with principles
requiring only watchfulness, not reformation; and
such a personal character as may exercise none by
healthy influences on her children!

FOOTNOTES:

[112] Gibbon.

ON THE MEANS OF SECURING PERSONAL INFLUENCE.

The qualities which seem more especially needful in
a character which is to influence others, are, consistency,
simplicity, and benevolence, or love.

By consistency of character, I mean consistency of
action with principle, of manner with thought, of
self with self. The want of this
quality is a failing with which our sex is often charged,
and justly; but are we to blame? Our hearts are
warm, our nerves irritable, and we have seen how little
there is, in existing systems of female education,
calculated to give wide, lofty, self-devoted principles
of action. Without such principles, there can
be no consistency of conduct; and without consistency
of conduct, there can be no available moral influence.

The peculiar evil arising from want of consistency,
is the want of trust or faith which it engenders.
This is felt in the common intercourse with the world.
In our relations with inconsistent persons, we are
like mariners at sea without a compass. On the
other hand, intercourse with consistent persons gives
to the mind a sort of tranquillity, peculiarly favourable
to happiness and to virtue. It is like the effect
produced by the perception of an immutable truth,
which, from the very force of contrast, is peculiarly
grateful to the inhabitants of so changeable a world
as this. It is moral repose.

This sort of moral repose is most peculiarly advantageous
to children, because it allows ample scope for the
development of their mental and moral faculties; banishing
from their minds all that chaotic bewilderment into
which dependence on inconsistent persons throws them.
It is advantageous to them in another, and more important
way,—­it prepares them for a belief in virtue;
a trust in others, which it is easy to train up into
a veneration for the source of all virtue; a trust
in the origin of all truth. There can be no clearness
of moral perception in the governed, where there is